Friday, November 12, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching Monday Night Football and got a phone call from a buddy. I paused the DVR and tried to cheerily say hello when my eye caught the TV screen, and I started laughing uncontrollably. I could hardly get a word out and eventually settled for taking a picture of the screen and texting it to my friend.

As you can guess from the title, the screen froze on an image of ESPN personality Stu Scott. I wasn't laughing at his eye. I don't enjoy making fun of it; it's just a thing, a condition so normal by now that I think of Thom Yorke as having a Stu Scott eye. There are other things to mock Stu for, like thinking that he would be a great Sportscenter anchor not by following Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann's lead and writing witty copy that fans turned into catchphrases, but rather by skipping the wit and fan parts, deciding on catchphrases himself and then running them into the ground. No, what I was laughing at was his huge, fabulously repulsive tie.

After I got off the phone, I shared this picture with other contributors to (and friends of) this site. Some people saw to it that a few eye jokes made their way into the piece. As a guy named The Bi Bandit put it: "[Given] Scott's tendency to say booya I'd like to encourage that stray football [that injured his eye] to maim harder in the future. But I feel really bad that I'm still laughing about a guy getting his eye all fucked up from a football-throwing machine." Agreed.

Still, that didn't stop anyone. Enjoy. (Click to embiggen.)

Goddamn, that's a real-as-shit Bayeaux Tapestry of ties. Y'all can't see it in this picture, but 1/256th of that shit is William of Normandy driving a spear through Harold Godwinson's ass. More like heavy wear's the coronel in your bunghole—whatup, bitch. When Henry Eightball and Frankie The One met all Calaiiiiid back in June, 1520, homeboys called it The Field of the Cloth of Stu Scott's Tie. Shit, English people who live in bigass houses can trace their all their dead-ass ancestors on that motherfucker. A kid failing a history test can peep that tie and use it as a crib sheet for high school, college and the next 20 years of cheatin' at Raccoon's Wing Hut's Tuesday Night Trivia when he and his fatass wife try to score the WXPI Thrill Zone's free tickets to see The Over-the-Thrillscape Tour headlined by Extreme, Better Than Ezra and Paula Cole. Speakin' of which, that whole thing was grown and knitted out of her armpit until they had to call a special migrant surgeon named Rodriguez to separate that shit from the patient with a weed-whacker.

An entire village of Luo tribespeople were abducted from Western Africa, one dehumanized corner of the triangle trade, ferried past the sharking skiffs of molasses and privilege, deposited into the pestilential, lush hell of Hispañola. It was there the village toiled, bereft of their native tongue, speaking obscenity. It was there obscenity became ethos. It was there an entire village extracted the indigo sufficient for Stu Scott's steppin'-out apparel.

They callin' one of those knots an eight-in-hand. That's just a four-in-hand so fuckin' big that they gotta knot it around Dikembe Mutumbo's mitts. In 2008, somebody saw that tie and thought it was the entire TARP fund. Last time I saw someone roll out a piece of fabric covers this much area, it just started raining at Fenway Park. If Stu ever starts swearing on air, shit ain't gonna matter because that big fucker's his golden parachute. In the event shit starts goin' south, a white lady like Erin Andrews comes out and tells y'all that Stu Scott's tie can be used as descent ramp from the airplane's forward bulkhead while nitrous comes out of the facemasks from the ceiling and... shit. I don't know, I kinda drifted off there a second because—and I ain't makin' this up—I swear I saw one of the paisley bitches go clear off the right side of that tie and pop back up on the left being chased by fuckin' Pacman like both of them were on PCP and shit.

There is a Japanese saying of wisdom: if one sets out for revenge, first dig two graves. There is an addendum: if one sets out for Dallas, fold your cheesecloth/spider-sugar Bushido warrior's sash with all the delicacy of a coughing two-minute spring rain. You shall know Hanzo grace, nurture — your cravat the cherry blossom incapable of capture by perceptible color, its dimple the inviting intimating crook of rural dumpling dicking.

There's so much space on that tie, ain't no average motherfucker on the planet even know how it works. Had to get some English butler-lookin' bitch named Dr. William Weir to bring that shit out to explain how you can interdimensionally fold space—startin' out in one place and wakin' up in another, like smokin' a fatass joint in the back of a van and before you know it you're in Jersey and your homeboy's all like, "Can you pay the toll?" like some off-brand bitch. Anyhow, whiteboy took one end and yanked it through the other, and some Big Bird plane he called the Event Horizon fell out of the fucking knot and just started hovering to a "nuh nuh nuh nuh" sound like that old game Asteroids until Stu started screaming, "Liberate Stuscottame, ex sartorius" and then tearing out his eyeballs, and that's how the right one got all fucked up.

Meanwhile, down on the field, Stu Scott paused in his post-game wrap-up as he felt a strange energy growing around him. His fey eye twitched, sensing the opening of a dimensional portal, the approach of some demi-planar being. The horizon lurched to the left, Stu to his right, the world out of kilter as the sound of a ref's whistle pierced the air. There: a scrap of fabric hit the turf. A flag? But it wasn't yellow. It was a luxurious shimmering purple. It was a handkerchief, the corner bearing the golden monogrammed letters, "U.H.", and then he was there, the Ultimate Hustler himself, gold-plated whistle between his teeth.

"Flag on the play!" he said. "Personal foul: my boy Stewie Scott for unnecessary roughness assaultin' my eyes with his straight doodoo bohunkus fashion sense! Damn luddy, y'all victim of a bingo bus hit-and-run, hundred grannies goin' straight through the windshield, leave they Sunday sittin' room design dreams all over yo tie. Shit look like a clown sneeze on it, look like you try to give it to Oscar Wilde, he go 'Naw son, shit's too gay for me'. And the fuck is up with those glasses? How many boxtops you send away for them? Lookin' like Aquaman frontin a Buddy Holly cover band. Met y'all wife the other day, she said you the most triflin' creepin'-around playa on the planet. I say, 'Baby how you know that?' She tell me it's cuz you always seein' someone on the side! Ha HA, y'all dome lookin' like it always signaling to make a right on red, and y'all shirt look like a dishrag."